Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Neal Boortz Defends White Santa

Though Megyn Kelly now disingenuously claims that she was just joking when she insisted that Santa Claus was white, Neal Boortz is defending what she said as true and making an utterly ludicrous comparison in doing so. Filling in for Herman Cain on his radio show, Boortz had this to say:

“Everything has got to be black now, it doesn’t matter what it is,” the caller laments.

“You know, I’m going to scream and complain because Martin Luther King is always portrayed as black,” Boortz quips. “It just ain’t right.”

Logic: You’re doing it wrong. Is Boortz really oblivious to the obvious distinction that Martin Luther King was a real black person, while Santa Claus is a fictional character? Of course not. But he’s doing right wing radio, where rationality is not just unexpected but considered proof that one is a liberal (and they may be right).

Comments

While I get that Santa is fictional, he is a fat guy from some place north of the arctic circle who moved there from northern Europe. The odds are, unless he’s related to Marcus Samuelson, he’s probably a white guy.

That being said, if anyone wants to tell their kids he’s not, it’s not like they are denying global warming or evolution. I can handle going into a store and seeing a black, Asian or Latino Santa. Since he’s a myth anyway, myths change over time as society changes.

YOu expect reason from these people? They’re just a bunch of overgrown children arguing about what their favorite fictional character looks like — and clinging desperately to their imaginings because their minds aren’t ready for anything more meaty or complicated.

And besides, as many black people have alraedy said, “Santa Claus” is the guy who puts presents under the tree while the kids are sleeping — and in a black family, chances are the guy (or woman) who REALLY puts the presents under the tree is black. So for those families, Santa IS black. So the whiny crackers of Faux News can either deal with it, or admit they’re just a bunch of pathetic little racists trying to belittle and deny the experiences of black people.

I’m sure the idea of a black man breaking into their house and leaving a new flat screen, instead of leaving with one, is just not a concept some people are equipped to handle. The pathways just don’t connect.

Modusoperandi – good point, conservative Martin Luther King was a white man whose main achievement was to talk the civil rights movement into being less uppity. He was also a timelord and later regenerated as Rush Limbaugh.

And why is the Right defending Santa? Granted, he runs a sweatshop (away from the machinations of the EPA, OSHA and the IRS) and he likes rich kids more, but still, he just gives his products away. Even the bad kids get coal. Free coal! Everybody getting “their” share is Socialism*!

And when we inflict our myths on other ethnic groups, they’re bound to put their own spin on them. This is just another wave of merciless rigid simpleminded Protestants demanding absolute conformity in all things and hatefully rejecting any hint of anything that isn’t exactly like what they’ve learned to expect.

Good point, Modus — whatever his skin color is, Santa is the last word in fat socialist wealth-redistributing poopyheads. He even wears a red uniform! Just another example of how things go horribly wrong when government gets into the business of picking winners and losers.

Seriously, though, this is the sort of trivial bullshit that the Right Wing gets outraged over? Like the Bee points out, their obsession with absolute conformity borders on pathological.

I wouldn’t even care about this nonsense, except that going on about wars on Christmas and claiming that a black Santa Claus is an insult to Santa doesn’t appear to distract them from inflicting great harm on others on important issues that do matter.

Jeremy: that question is already settled: Krampus is white, and his henchman Black Pete is black — in fact, he’s the original Scary Angry Black Man, white-slavery scare-stories and all. The wingnuts will love ’em both.

I wouldn’t even care about this nonsense, except that going on about wars on Christmas and claiming that a black Santa Claus is an insult to Santa doesn’t appear to distract them from inflicting great harm on others on important issues that do matter.

The same thing happened in the original Reformation. This is just a pale imitation of that.

Yes, Virginia, St. Nicholas, aka Santa Claus, was detained by the TSA and Homeland Security for flying as a brown-skinned Turk from Anatolia. Damn terrorists. Claimed to be the same as the REAL Santa, who we all know is a fat white CEO running a sweatsho…, er, factory, manned by his Eskimo elves happy for the employment opportunities.

And besides, as many black people have alraedy said, “Santa Claus” is the guy who puts presents under the tree while the kids are sleeping — and in a black family, chances are the guy (or woman) who REALLY puts the presents under the tree is black.

On DC’s public radio station last Sunday, they had a collection of Christmas music and tales. One was a reminisce by an African-American man about his widowed mother and how she managed a great Christmas every year even though she was raising several kids on a very small income. She talked about going to the Salvation Army to buy all of last year’s toys that the rich people were tossing to make room for this Christmas and other ways she managed to get her kids everything they wanted. However, she added that she wouldn’t teach them about Santa Claus because she wasn’t going to give credit for her hard work to some myth. I loved it.

…However, she added that she wouldn’t teach them about Santa Claus because she wasn’t going to give credit for her hard work to some myth. I loved it.

Yeah, that raises another question as to why these so-called “news” people are so eager to push this myth…perhaps they’re having trouble with the idea of black people being providers?

Thumper: Anatolis is now called Turkey, and in St. Nick’s time, it had not yet been poulated by the Asian migrants who came to be called Turks (from “Tu Kui” IIRC). So the natives of Anatolia were probably a mix of Greek, Arab and Persian, and probably, yes, North African as well. (I’m pretty sure those ethnic groups weren’t nearly as segregated as whites and blacks in America — they had CENTURIES to mix.) Were these people “white?” That probably depends on how (and WHY) you define “white,” but I’m sure the people who care most about such things would all answer flatly “NO.”

And since the concepts of “race” being bandied about here are nearly as fictional as Santa Claus, that just adds a whole new icing of stoopid to this manure cake.

It sounds to me like the only reasonable thing for all of us to do is make sure that every depiction of Santa that we control is a black one, drawn right next to Mohammed. People who scream about everything deserve to be prodded constantly.

Anatolis is now called Turkey, and in St. Nick’s time, it had not yet been poulated by the Asian migrants who came to be called Turks (from “Tu Kui” IIRC). So the natives of Anatolia were probably a mix of Greek, Arab and Persian, and probably, yes, North African as well.

Interestingly it seems the Turkish takeover of Anatolia was cultural rather than a population replacement so there is a good chance the inhabitants in Nick’s time looked much as Turkish people do today. Which is to say as varied as any other large group of humans but, yes, probably for the most part not what Neal Boortz would call white.

I think the argument over whether the historical Saint Nicholas was white misses the point. The question is why is it acceptable to re-imagine a historical 4th-century Anatolian as a jolly old elf who lives in a toy factory at the North Pole and drives a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, but not acceptable to re-imagine him as a black man?

DaveL, because black people are scary. Everybody knows that Black Santa would enter your home with an empty sack and leave with a full one. Am I right, people? What? What? Sure, it’s not “politically correct” to say, but there’s no need to boo me. I’m just callin’ it straight. I’m not racist (I’ve got a black friend. I even let him use my bathroom), it’s just a simple fact that Black Santa would be a crimi…no, I’m not going to shut up.
Look, this has all been covered before. FoxNews had a big exposé on scary black people, in the story called “Every FoxNews story for the past five years”. Look it up.

Really? It’s pretty fucking obvious that she was just joking from the original segment, without any need to clarify. Even Jon Stewart acknowledged that. She said enough ridiculous, disingenuous, borderline racist things during that segment that there’s no need to take the one obvious joke out of context in order to skewer her. Don’t be a dick.

“Humor is what we try to bring to this show, but that’s lost on the humorless… This would be funny if it were not so telling about our society, in particular, the knee-jerk instinct by so many to race-bait and to assume the worst in people, especially people employed by the very powerful Fox News Channel.

Megyn Kelly was only joking. She’s totally not racist, which is why she’s decided to embrace black Santa this year by replacing the cookies and milk with watermelon and grape soda. See, the real story here is she’s the one who is being stereotyped and persecuted.

She said enough ridiculous, disingenuous, borderline racist things during that segment that there’s no need to take the one obvious joke out of context in order to skewer her.

Actually, if that “joke” was part of a tirade of “ridiculous, disingenuous, borderline racist things,” then we’re NOT taking it out of context — we’re rightly skewering her for being a ridiculous, disingenuous, borderline (at best) racist. And the “context” you speak of proves it, with or without the “joke.”

Neither funny nor dishonest. Anatolia constitutes the vast majority of what is now Turkey. Saint Nicholas was born there before the Ottoman invasion, but the native people would certainly not have been considered white by today’s standards. The Republican party would probably referr to him as “swarthy”.

Yes, I’m aware, but I doubt any of the Republicans raving about “White Santa” would describe him as White. Not if they were shown a photo of him without being told who he was and asked “What race is this guy?”.

Apparently, Brainless Bill O’Really, has conclusively demonstrated that Santa is white. He showed a Russian icon of St. Nick clearly portraying him as white. He did mention that St. Nick was from Asia Minor, but that didn’t seem to shake his conviction that a Russian icon accurately portrays somebody from a quarter of the world away.

The Saint Nicholas on whom Santa is based was a Caucasian, a Greek Christian living in Asia Minor. I’m certainly white and I wouldn’t consider him or his compatriots today to be of a different race from myself. I think Americans may see things differently.

Not that it matters because Santa is to all intents and purpose a fictional character and can be played by anyone, of any race or, for that matter, gender.

lofgren @32: Really? It’s pretty fucking obvious that she was just joking from the original segment, without any need to clarify. Even Jon Stewart acknowledged that. She said enough ridiculous, disingenuous, borderline racist things during that segment that there’s no need to take the one obvious joke out of context in order to skewer her. Don’t be a dick.

Um, you obviously need to get your humor detector recalibrated. Jon Stewart’s “acceptance” of Megyn Kelly’s line about it being just a joke was pretty obviously not intended to be taken seriously. He even re-played the line after “accepting” it and the original came across as a pretty straightforward statement of fact.

Except that he wasn’t. Both Sinterklaas and gift-giving on the Winter Solstice are pre-Christian traditions. Christianity simply took a saint vaguely associated with gift-giving (who conveniently also happened to have a feast day reasonably close to the solstice) and used him to paper over these pre-Christian traditions. Saint Nicholas was a historical figure unrelated to the Nativity of Jesus (which itself most probably happened in the summer months, otherwise the shepherds wouldn’t be out watching their sheep). Sinterklaas/Santa Claus was always a mythological figure.

As I understand modern Santa is a 19th/20th Century creation made by merging legends about Nicholas of Myra with the English Father Christmas, who was in the past as much a personification of the festival as a gift giver and who may have originally been Odin.

He even re-played the line after “accepting” it and the original came across as a pretty straightforward statement of fact.

She says “For all the kids out there, Santa Claus just is white.” She is making light of the fact that as adults we are discussing appropriate depictions of a fictional character, while for most of the kids out there Santa Claus is a real person whose race is a matter of verifiable fact, and most of them are only familiar with the white guy who appears in car ads and Rankin/Bass cartoons. Stewart treated it as a statement of fact because it was funnier that way. It clearly wasn’t and he clearly knew that. She made enough dumb statements during that segment that it makes us look like real assholes to take the one thing that was unambiguously a joke out of context and harp on it over and over again.

It’s like the arguments I used to get into in high school concerning whether it was really Eowyn who killed the Lord of the Nazgul or Merry Brandybuck. Though of course we were discussing more realistic characters.

She says “For all the kids out there, Santa Claus just is white.” She is making light of the fact that as adults we are discussing appropriate depictions of a fictional character, while for most of the kids out there Santa Claus is a real person whose race is a matter of verifiable fact…

How is that a joke? It sounds a lot like a factual assertion (and a dead-wrong one), flanked by ridicule of people who disagree with it.

And besides, lofgren, after so many years of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, are you really still too stupid to see through that same old “I was only kidding!” dodge? We’ve been hearing that shit every time some reich-wing moron has to run away from a statement he/she can’t defend — haven’t you learned anything from it?

And who the fuck are you talking about when you refer to “most of the kids out there?” And how, exactly, do they “verify” Santa’s race? Like I said before, there’s a good number of kids who see a BLACK person putting presents under their trees. Does their “verification” not count for you?

It’s not wonder you’re trying to defend Kelly — you seem to have the same racial blind-spots she does.

lofgren – I have not seen the segment, nor watched the Jon Stewart response to it, so I have no opinion on whether it was a joke or not. But I think characterizing it as “unambiguous” is disingenuous when there is so much disagreement on this thread.

Personally I think if they could change Felix Leiter (James Bond’s CIA liaison) from white to black in that one Bond film, they (whoever wants to) can change Santa Claus from white to black. I’m just sayin’…

Raging Bee“And who the fuck are you talking about when you refer to “most of the kids out there?” And how, exactly, do they ‘verify’ Santa’s race?”
It’s easy. Only White Santa makes it to your house. Black Santa gets pulled over, and Swarthy Santa is on the No Fly list.

lofgren – I have not seen the segment, nor watched the Jon Stewart response to it, so I have no opinion on whether it was a joke or not. But I think characterizing it as “unambiguous” is disingenuous when there is so much disagreement on this thread.

I think characterizing it as anything is disingenuous when you won’t even watch it. It’s the very first thing she says in the segment.

If somebody says, “For all you kids out there,” and then follows it up with a statement about Santa treating him as if he is a real person, that is a joke. “For all you kids out there, Santa does drive a flying sleigh.” “For all you kids out there, Santa lives at the North Pole.” “For all you kids out there, Santa did run over my grandma.” Especially when they then follow it up with a whole conversation that treats Santa as a fictional person, clearly indicating that they are aware that Santa is not in fact a real person. This is trebly true when they are a news anchor broadcasting at 11:30 at night.